“What’s that for?” John asked a few minutes later as she ran across the flagstones to prop the Herald against the door of Mischa’s cottage.
“My neighbour is a writer,” Laddy explained rapidly, scrabbling through her thoughts for an innocuous explanation. “When they called out searchers he came along—he and I found Rhodri, and I thought he’d be interested in seeing the story.”
None of which was exactly a lie, Laddy thought as she led John along the Coastal Path by the house. Interested Mischa would certainly be—and he would understand how this fame would go to Rhodri’s head—but he would also wonder why Laddy had given him no advance warning of the fact that the town was filled with the people to whom, at the moment, he least wished to talk.
“Is there anyone guarding the place?” John asked as Laddy led him along the Coastal Path towards the beach, moving west into the brightly setting sun.
“A man from the national museum came to look at it around noon,” Laddy replied. “He left, but he was coming back. If he’s camped out there already, we may not get any pictures.”
“We’ll get the pictures,” said John firmly, “even if an army of archaeologists is camped out there. This is Crown land and accessible to the public until they get a permit to close it off. They won’t have that yet.” He was thinking these might be exclusive pictures, Laddy could see.
“Well, there won’t be an army,” she said mildly. “Just Roger Smith, who is not as big as you.”
But there was no evidence of the young archaeologist as they approached the cave, and Laddy wrinkled her brow in dismay. She had expected—from what he had said to Rhodri and to her this afternoon after examining the inner cave and congratulating Rhodri on his find with an air of awed excitement that thrilled Rhodri more than his actual words—to find that Roger Smith had returned hotfoot to the site to set up his tent. It would be too bad if the cave were overrun by sightseers in his absence.
Laddy and John, having made sure that no one was in sight on the cliff above or on the beach, climbed the last few feet of sharply sloping shingle to the mouth of the cave. Inside the duskily lighted outer cave, John glanced around.
“This is the right cave?” he asked.
“Yes,” Laddy said. “To get to the paintings you have to crawl through there.”
John Bentinck eyed the narrow passage with disfavour.
“Not unless we make that hole larger,” he said, and there was some justice in that. He was by no means as tall as Mischa, but he had a good deal more flesh on his frame.
And he was not used to squeezing under the barbed-wire fences of a Siberian labour camp to get shag to the men in the box.
“Well, we can’t do that,” she said firmly. The larger the hole, the more likelihood there was of sightseers finding the paintings before archaeologists could protect the site. “Set up the camera for me, and I’ll get the pictures. I’ve been in there before.”
John was a photographer before anything else. He did not demur but immediately began asking her questions about the size and position of the paintings.
When he had adjusted the lens and instructed her on the use of the camera, Laddy held the torch in front of her and inched as before into the ancient artist’s breath-taking gallery.
The magnificent red-brown and black reindeer postured in death as before, though she had almost expected him to have moved. Laddy stood on the rocky slope for a quiet moment, staring at the painted figures, and shivered suddenly. She flashed the torch towards the back of the cavern, but the light could not pierce the black depths or show her where the cavern ended. Laddy gazed blindly into the empty darkness for a moment. Then with a shake of her head she turned away from the unknown depths and called to John in a matter-of-fact tone, “Ready!” She aimed the light through the hole and reached to take the camera he held out to her.
He had set it; all she had to do was focus as well as she could in the weak light and shoot. She chose the best bit first: fixing on the huge, powerful, black-outlined animal, she took several shots, the flash attachment blinding her after the first one so that thereafter she closed her eyes each time she pressed the button.
She moved down the cavern over the uneven floor, shivering under the combined effects of the chill air and nervousness, until she had taken nearly twenty shots in all. Then, picking up the flashlight from the floor she stumbled back up to the passage and passed the camera through.
“Good girl!” John exclaimed. Now she had only the painful job of inching through the jagged tunnel again.
As she crawled along the narrow tunnel, her head almost into the front cave, her feet still in the black cavern behind, she was seized by a sudden primitive fear of what might lie behind her in that endless cavern, a fear so near to panic that she wanted to scream to John to grab her and drag her through. But she soundlessly fought the fear and made her way inch by inch back to reason and the outer cave.
John shot pictures of the narrow tunnel, of the pile of rocks on the sloping floor of the outer cave, and then declared himself satisfied.
“Am I going to get a shot of the child prodigy?” he queried, carefully consigning the film to his camera bag and rolling a new one into the back of the camera.
“Rhodri!” she exclaimed. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to catch him before he goes to bed!”
John laughed. “If the lad goes to bed before midnight tonight, I’ll be surprised. He’s tomorrow’s news, remember? And no doubt enjoying it hugely.”
Rhodri was indeed loving his sudden fame. In the small warm house where Mairi Davies and her husband made a home for her younger sister and brother, Rhodri was suddenly king.
He sat on a chair in the centre of the sitting room surrounded by television teams and journalists and photographers, who were asking questions, taking notes and listening to his excited young voice with a flattering deference. His family stood and sat around the room, Mairi and her husband Alun, Brigit and her fiancé Bran; several neighbours also were present. It was his moment, and Rhodri’s flushed cheeks and bright eyes told Laddy as she and John entered the room that he was taking full advantage of it.
“I didn’t happen on the paintings,” he was explaining clearly and patiently to a man holding a microphone whom Rhodri plainly thought rather slow. “I was looking for cave art—I was hoping to find it.” He fixed the man with a look. “I was not out looking for a lost sheep, you know. Please do not tell them that I was,” he said sternly, and everyone in the room laughed.
“No chance,” drawled the man in a transatlantic accent, laughing, too.
Beside Laddy, John was attaching a lens to his camera. “Bright kid,” he said briefly. Before she could reply he was moving away to find a clear angle for photos. Laddy followed him.
“Take some pictures of him with the media people, John,” she whispered. “The family will like to have them.” Intent on his subject, John nodded, and Laddy went to sit on the settee beside Brigit.
“Proud?” Laddy whispered. Brigit reached out and squeezed her hand.
“We’re very grateful to you and Mischa, Laddy,” Brigit said quietly. “If it hadn’t been for you, we might never have found him. I keep thinking how differently we’d have been feeling tonight if....”
“My two friends found me,” Rhodri’s clear, carrying voice said suddenly in answer to a question, and Laddy tensed in sudden horror, her eyes fixed on his glowing face. She had hoped to warn Rhodri to say nothing of Mischa in this affair, but there had been no time. If he mentioned that name in this gathering…!
Brigit bent forward. “I warned him not to say Mischa’s name,” she whispered. “Don’t worry.” Brigit had guessed who Mischa was from the first day, but she had said nothing about it to anyone—even Mairi. Laddy looked at her now in surprised gratitude. That in all the excitement of this day she had found time to remember and protect Mischa Busnetsky’s privacy....
Rhodri was saying, “They knew I was looking in the caves, and when I didn’t come home, the
y came and found me.”
“Are they school friends of yours?” called the reporter of a local paper, who was thinking that three children would make an even better story than one.
“Oh no,” Rhodri said with a broad smile. “They are quite grown up, you know. I think...I think they are going to get married.”
***
The car screeched to a halt in front of the white gate with inches to spare, and Laddy was climbing out the passenger door before John could reach to turn off the ignition.
“Don’t get out, John,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
When she was halfway through the gate, the car door slammed and she knew John was coming after her. Resolutely Laddy kept her face forward and began walking over the meadow towards the warm light that beckoned her from Mischa Busnetsky’s cottage.
“I want to have this out, Laddy,” John’s voice said behind her in the night air. Realizing that he would follow her right across the meadow to the cottages and knowing that she must keep him from catching sight of Mischa, Laddy stopped and turned.
“John, there’s nothing to have out,” she said. “I’ve told you that Rhodri was being fanciful. What else is there to say?”
She had lied to John, telling him she scarcely knew her neighbour in the other cottage, saying anything that would keep him from trying to get a look at Mischa.
“You can say you’re coming back to London with me, if that’s true,” John returned.
“Well, I am not going back to London with you, John,” Laddy said, her anger beginning to show. “I am waiting for a story to break and I’m not leaving Trefelin till it does, if I can help it. Besides that, Rhodri—”
She was interrupted by a harsh incredulous laugh. “Come off it, Laddy!” John said. “You’re forgetting yourself—your story broke this morning, remember? That’s why I’m here.”
There was a little silence between them as she realised that she should have let him go on thinking what he did—but it was too late now.
“No, that just happened,” Laddy said. “There’s another—”
“Laddy,” he said, and his voice was pleading now, “don’t lie to me. I love you, Laddy. I’ve tried not to tell you because I didn’t want to scare you, but I love you. Now tell me the truth.”
Starlight bathed his golden head, but she couldn’t see his face in the darkness. She swallowed suddenly.
“I can’t tell you all the truth, John,” she said in a low voice.
He said harshly, “Then just tell me this: do you love me?”
Not even the sound of the ocean was there to break the silence. “I’m not in love with you, John,” she said quietly, after a moment. “I—”
Suddenly he pulled her against him, looking down into her face. “You would have been! You would have been, if it weren’t for him!” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Damn him!” And as she pushed to get out of his arms he bent and kissed her, a hot, tormented, possessive kiss. She did not struggle. She stood rigid and unmoved under the searching attack, and when he let her go his face was bitter.
“After that, don’t try to tell me it’s work that’s suddenly come between us,” he said angrily. “If it is, you sacrifice one hell of a lot for a story. You just sacrificed us!” He turned on his heel in the moonlight and strode towards his car.
Weary and shaken, she turned to cross the meadow. A few minutes later her heart leaped as she saw the door to Mischa’s cottage open, the warm inviting light inside framing his lean, tall figure as he waited for her. On a half-sob of desperate need, Laddy began to run towards him through the scented moonlight like a wanderer who has seen home. She ran straight into his arms and clung to him.
“Hold me,” she said. “Hold me.”
And Mischa Busnetsky’s arms closed warmly and securely around her body at her plea, but over her head his voice was saying, coldly, incredibly, “But of course. A woman who has sacrificed so much is entitled to a little comfort.”
Chapter 11
“What do you mean?” Laddy drew back in bewilderment, and immediately his arms released her. Never in her life had she been so bereft. His eyes were remote, condemning, and with the sudden conviction that he was going to close the door in her face, she stepped quickly past him into the warm, soft light of the kitchen. “What is it? What do you mean?” she asked again.
Closing the door, he said, “You should not have forgotten my habit of taking a nocturnal walk, nor how the sound of voices carries at night.”
“What are you saying?” she asked, bewildered. “That you overheard my conversation with John? But why has that—” She broke off as she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye, and she turned her head suddenly towards the window. “What was that?” Laddy said. “There’s someone—”
But Mischa’s dry voice halted her. “I don’t think so,” he said ironically, and perhaps he was right. Not in thinking it an attempt to distract his attention, but perhaps her nerves were making her jumpy.
“Let’s go into the other room,” she said, nonetheless. “The curtains are drawn there.”
“By all means,” Mischa said blandly, following her into the cosy sitting room. “But don’t you think you’ve done enough acting?”
“Mischa,” she begged, her heart pounding crazily, her stomach hollow with fear. “What’s the matter? Don’t look at me like that.”
She reached for him. If she could touch him all this would disappear; it was a nightmare, his looking at her like that, so cold, so angry....
“I would advise you not to touch me again,” Mischa said. “Unless you are willing to repeat the sacrifice you made here last night.”
She gasped, her brain stunned by the consciousness of what he meant, her stomach burning at what she saw in his eyes.
She crossed to him and reached her arms around his neck. “I don’t know what you think you heard out there,” she said, willing him to touch her, to hold her. “But whatever it was, you’re wrong. I love you.”
A flame burned behind his dark, dilated pupils as he looked down at her, and then his broad hands gripped her waist.
“Or perhaps you feel you were short-changed last night,” he said as though she hadn’t spoken. “I was so desperate for you, was I not? You did not achieve the kind of pleasure a woman has a right to expect. You must forgive me. But tonight I shall not be so desperate.”
She tried to step away from him then, away from the sensuous anger in his eyes, but the hands around her waist were suddenly steel.
“Mischa,” she begged, and he bent his head, and while her lips were parted, his tongue came between them and his mouth scorched hers.
She felt the kiss in every nerve, and in spite of herself her fingers gripped his shoulders, and her lips begged him silently not to take his mouth away. In answer the hard hands at her waist pulled her body roughly to his, and he pressed against her. His body was hard with desire and anger, and she gasped for the breath she suddenly needed.
The response of his mouth was to pillage deeper, bending her backwards to increase her body’s passionate awareness of his, igniting fires in her that chased down her veins as though her blood were gunpowder. She was lost now, and she clung to him, her mouth stretching wider under his, her hands clinging desperately around his neck.
Then the long muscles of his shoulders tensed, and she was lifted off the ground, his hands warm now on her denimed thighs, and against her body she felt the slow rhythmic glide of his hips as he carried her through the darkened doorway of the bedroom.
He lay with her in the darkness on the soft bed for a moment. Then his long arm reached out over her, and a moment later the soft glow of the bedside lamp was in her eyes. She gazed hungrily up at him, knowing she had forgotten her own name.
His hooded eyes staring into hers hid from her everything except his passion, and when his gaze shifted to her mouth, her throat, her heaving breasts, the trail it left burnt her as hotly as though his mouth had blazed the trail.
“Mischa,” she asked pleadingly, because she saw no love in his eyes, “do you love me?”
Mischa smiled. “I love you,” he said roughly. “But do not be troubled in your conscience. They say every man loves a cheating woman once in his life. This will not kill me.”
Laddy gasped aloud. “Cheating?” she repeated in stupid amazement. “Mischa, I love—”
“Shut up,” he said, and his mouth came down on hers. “I can take only so much.”
His hand cupped her breast and his rough-skinned thumb brushed back and forth over her sensitive nipple, and when he lifted his mouth from hers to run kisses down over her neck and throat to her breast she was shaking so that she could only moan.
The thin cloth of her shirt was sensuous torment on her flesh as he slowly slid it from her body, his mouth and tongue finding each square inch of her sensitised skin as the sliding fabric bared it to his eyes. He removed her blue jeans, and she lay naked under his gaze, naked and trembling under the onslaught of his mouth and hands.
“I love you,” she cried, her head arching back into the pillow as the fire set by his mouth and hands blazed in her body. He stopped to throw off his own clothes, and then his skin was against the length of hers, and this was the touch she had yearned for.
“I love you,” she said, looking into his eyes, and she saw pain suddenly reflected there, as though she had struck him.
“Shut up,” he said again, kissing her. In defiance she cried it again under his lips as they moved over hers, unable to believe that her love could cause the pain she had seen.
“I love you,” she whispered against his kisses, feeling the shuddering response of his body to her words, “I love you. I—”
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